To the many people who under the impression that my Podcast would be "on the air," so to speak, I must apologize. I have come down with a rather nasty cold, which has diminished my ability to put the finishing touches on the first episode. My voice definitely does not sound good enough for recording just now.

As far as I can tell, something has cursed me. Just about every gadget or gizmo I buy seems to fail, die, or otherwise incapacitate itself at some point during its lifetime. However, with Apple's products I have experienced a slight downtick in the number of problems. My PowerBook, for example, only had its logic board and hard drive die, and neither of my two iPods has ever needed servicing. All of that my not have the aura of good luck per se, but relatively speaking this is progress. The first digital camera I ever owned died when the mode dial popped off.

So, it came as a real shock when I realized about five minutes ago that my gorgeous Apple Cinema Display had developed what I believe to be a dreaded "dead-pixel." For the less computer oriented, a dead-pixel is one tiny little dot on an LCD monitor which either does not turn on, or, in my case, remains one color all of the time. Some argue that dead-pixels are almost expected when the panel composes some 1.7 million dots. However, when Apple charges what they do for their displays, they should look perfect. Furthermore, a dead-pixel cannot begin to function again with mere tinkering. To fix the problem one must remove and replace the entire LCD panel - something neither cheap nor simple.

I hope that this problem does not actually exist, but rather cropped up out of nowhere for a temporary period of time. Software exists for the purpose of running the screen through a barrage of tests to attempt to fix the dead pixel, though I have no idea how well said software works. It is also possible that I merely need to "rest" my computer monitor overnight. Though, if my problem turns out to be real, then I will feel absolutely enraged at not having 5.66890000053 X 10^-5% of my display.